Tomorrow's world

ACCA’s Accountancy Futures Academy is exploring the future role of accountants. It will be radically different, say academy chairman Ng Boon Yew and futurist Rohit Talwar

This article was first published in the May 2012 International edition of Accounting and Business magazine.

The world is undergoing a period of profound transformation driven by global political, economic and technological shifts. Taken together, these forces suggest that the role and expectations of the accountant of tomorrow and the industry they inhabit could be radically different from the profession today. So how can the profession prepare for an uncertain future when we all feel there is already a full agenda dealing with today’s challenges?

Recognising the need to help accountants explore these long-term drivers of change, ACCA has started the Accountancy Futures Academy. Its mission is to provide a radar to highlight the trends, driving forces and ideas that could shape the future global business and accountancy landscape.

The first output from the academy is a consultation with members of ACCA’s global forums. The objective is to identify the drivers of change that accountants should be thinking about to prepare them for future challenges. This article looks at some of the emerging findings from the study being coordinated by Fast Future Research.

The changing economic landscape is seen as central to any exploration of the future of business. We are in the middle of a period of deep economic uncertainty. For accountants, this puts the spotlight on our risk and resilience plans – how are we factoring in the potential collapse of key parts of the economic infrastructure in individual markets or globally?

Increasing influence

While mature economies focus on surviving and navigating the current turbulence, emerging economies are growing, particularly the BRIC nations. It is clear that the BRICs will have an increasingly influential say in how global economic systems are shaped and governed. These countries are presenting global accountancy firms with opportunities, in terms of markets to expand into, but also challenges as a potential source of future rivals. Could we see multinationals transferring their accounting business to firms from the BRIC economies?

Political power can be expected to follow financial power, with both China and India having more of a say on the evolution of the key institutions of global governance. This could give both countries the platform to set the rules and agenda for the new so-called Asian century. This could have far-reaching implications for how the global accountancy profession evolves in future, especially with regards to the definition and adoption of uniform global accounting standards. Could these standards come to reflect Eastern rather than Western practices?

Population shifts

Demographic shifts are reshaping the make-up of the global population. By 2050, the Asia Pacific region will have grown by more than the populations of Europe and North America combined, with Europe itself expected to shrink by around the size of Germany. Global life expectancy is projected to continue increasing and enforced retirement ages abandoned. This raises questions about how we effectively manage and provide career opportunities for multiple generations in the workforce.

The business of business is also undergoing fundamental change – with new business models offering the potential to transform our notions of risk and value. Firms are increasingly opting to switch from ownership of fixed assets to renting the services provided by those assets – cloud computing is one such example. The risks of new product development and new venture creation are also being transformed by crowd-sourcing models such as Kickstarter.com, which enable entrepreneurs and innovators to raise the necessary financial commitments from the customer before embarking on the project. Sales approaches such as aggregated buying and the auction model are increasingly being used by businesses to sell their offerings. How will accounting practices and risk assessments need to change to take account of a rapidly changing set of business models with often unpredictable revenue streams?

The financial crisis has highlighted the need for businesses to construct ‘living wills’ to facilitate an orderly unravelling of their affairs in case of insolvency. Accountants can play a key role here, but how deeply will the finance function need to be embedded in the transactions, products and pricing models of the organisation to appreciate the scale and detail of what needs to be unravelled?

The growing complexity of business and the need for integration are placing greater demands on information technology. IT has revolutionised the workplace – digitising workflows and assets, and creating new opportunities with people generating real-world fortunes from buying and selling virtual assets in online environments such as Second Life. Advances in artificial intelligence could lead to further automation of accounting functions.

Further down the road, technological advances could mean we download core accounting data directly into our brains. The core question is whether the roadmap for accounting systems development will be flexible enough to cope with a range of possible business scenarios.

Taken collectively, all these drivers suggest we are now entering a period of fundamental change for the global economy, for the general world of business and, as a result, for the accountancy profession.

*FORUM SYMPOSIUM

Chairs of ACCA’s 10 global forums met for a Global Forums Symposium in March in London to discuss the issues that will be confronting the accountancy profession over the coming months and years.

A presentation based on the research described in this article provided a basis for lively discussions on a wide range of topics including global economic uncertainty, audit, complexity, regulation, adding value, principles, sustainability, investors and reporting, the public sector and fraud.

The forums aim to further thinking on current and future issues in a number of specific areas, as well look at the challenges and opportunities facing the accountancy profession generally.

*going in for the skill

Accountants must learn to plan for and think in terms of multiple possible scenarios. An emerging competence is developing the agility and processes to cope with ever-shorter business cycles. Accountants also need to become adept at navigating and tackling operational and regulatory complexity and the rising number of non-financial indices used to measure value. The need to play a bigger role in business decision-making and the globalised nature of work mean accountants seeking international opportunities will have to expand their strategic, language and cultural skillsets. The backlash from the financial crisis, combined with greater moves towards environmental sustainability, will also result in growing regulatory requirements for accountants to act as public interest watchdogs.

Ng Boon Yew FCCA is chairman of ACCA’s Accountancy Futures Academy and executive chairman of Raffles Campus. Rohit Talwar is a global futurist and founder and CEO of Fast Future Research